Christmas

The project description is coming along now. Almost there! I have had some good advice from my supervisor Prof. Lohman these last days. Sending him texts in the afternoon and phoning him the morning after. Two days ago he said; I suggest you restructure your chapters into four sections! Once again the text was chopped up, shaken, stired and this time placed on the wall (together with the christmas decorations, accompanied by Elvis singing christmas carols^^). Et voilá! Brand new project description!

bringing It feels good working with the text physically, actuallyout a pair of scissors and hearing the sound ofthe paper being cut. Fortunato: Since the Mac is still not healthy I do not have a project planner software to make my detailed project plan for next year. So I will have to draw one by hand! Revolutionary, I know! Wish me luck!

Abstractions of Designing Culture

My dear sweet Mac has started trying to help me out by simplifying my thoughts, my visuals... heck, everything I do! These are some of his recent works... Quite beautiful! But kinda hard to work with... So its off to major surgery and rehab for the little one, while I try to work out how to get the project description done in time without the proper software... Fortunately we are a two computer family, I guess I can persuade the PC to actually do some work and not just hang out being cool and play WoW like he usually does. Just need to get a copy of Word, maybe they have a loaning version at school? Stay tuned for the developments in this exiting thriller!

(oh and dont click on the pictures to see better; I dont have the software to make them screen sized ^^. Allthough if you do click them you will see some of the rather beautiful nuances of the colors in the stripes :-))

Spread Sheets

Working on the revised project description these weeks! Had a very good meeting with headmaster at KHiB, Nina Malterud. She pointed out a series of subjects that I still need to explore and explain in the text that I will hand in by December 21. The session was short, but exellent! While she was pointing out what was lacking I was thinking "Yes! Ofc! There it is!" Her comments made several topics fall into place for me ^^.

Now I have chopped the text into pieces (as I was adviced to do by Prof. Bryan Lawson when attending one of his courses some years ago), shaken the mix and like a phoenix the improved project description will rise from the ashes of the old!

Friedman on sharing ideas

I was just sent this clip from a friend. It's a little story about Milton Friedman's thoughts on plagarizing, or actually on idea sharing. Let it be an inspiration for all of us!

The story starts at 00:50 and ends at approx. 01:30
Milton Friedman on Plagarizing Ideas

My sympathies

I don't read Garfield anymore... I used to. When I was 11 "Pusur"(Norwegian name) was the coolest cat around...

But, as one of the
1. first research fellows in a
2. freshly started programme for research and development, in a
3. field that does not have a long and solid history in research,
I sympathise with Jon in this strip.
Although, fortunately, I am not that desperate atm ;-) (it might come back later I suppose... :-p)

Great meeting @ SIFO

On wednesday morning we had a great meeting with Annechen Bahr Bugge and Runar Døving at SIFO! The meeting was most inspiring and the two of them had lots of ideas as to what themes would be relevant for us. Now ofc we need to sit down and sort out what is relevant to our project. On tuesday afternoon I suddenly had three/four ideas of how this can be visualised.
So stay tuned! We will be right back after this...

Brainwork

I was going to write the new enhanced brief on friday, had told Jack I would send it to him at the end of the week... Just couldn't do it... postponed all day untill it was to late... then in the weekend I pretended to forget about it... did some work for my company (bills etc), some housework and generally had the time of... come monday morning and I wake up thinking: "...this goes before that... that sentence gets cut... I need to write about these things...". The structure was set in my mind, and I sat down at the computer and spent 3 hours writing it all smoothly! Good brain. Working when I am not ;-)

Fiskeboller at the railwaystation?

Some conceptual sketches of an installation at the railwaystation in Bergen... Could this be a location for Fiskeboller i karri?

un/finished thoughts on design and art / research and development

After SK4 - as a part of a programme that doesn't mention design in its title - on a school that doesn't mention design in its name.

The three settings above all equals art with design. Or rather: When talking about art(istic research) they often add "...and I also talk about design (research) ofc!" But is it enough? I am starting to feel that there are some serious differences between art and design that are not visible when design is added as an afterthought.

This difference becomes increasingly apparent when talking about research and development. SK4, Stipendiatprogrammet and Kunsthøgskolen are all involved in the quest to define and discuss artistic research. The two last are also producing it.

In these fora we continuously discuss what makes an art project a research project. At SK4 we even got the honest response that it was research because it was partly funded by a research grant. In addition we discuss when something is art... (or artistic enough). Linda Worbin got the comment that her research was (quite correctly) not artistic research, but rather (quite uncorrectly) engineering research.

Like Janneke Wesseling commented on the last day of the conference: we need to start making distinctions.

Art and design, research and development are distinctly different entities. (I will not go into a full discussion about the difference between art and design. Suffice to quote Michael Brady, at the University of North Carolina, when he writes "The differences between art and design lie not so much in how they look as in what they do: They have different purposes, they are made differently, they are judged by different criteria, and they have different audiences.")

Here is my attempt to make some clearifications on research and development.
There is art. There is design. There is research. There is development.
The two first can be combined with the two last into four different kinds of projects:
Artistic research. Artistic development. Design research. Design development.

Artistic development and design development projects are are similar in the sense that they are practical projects resulting in an artwork/design product. In addition the artist/designer conducting the work is concerned with something more than the project's end result in itself and is able to communicate their findings and reflections to a larger/relevant audience. (My own project is a design development project where I, through the design of two exhibitions explore the question "What is the role of the exhibition designer in the development of historic exhibitions?". My findings will be communicated to a relevant audience through my website, through lectures and discussions and finally through a publication.)

Design research will have a defined problem to solve. This is often based on material, form, function, process or.. (what else?). Linda Worbin's work is an example of a design research project where she explores the possibilities of a material for future designs. (Other examples could be the work conducted at The Sustainable Design Research Centre in London or at the Centre for Design Research at Northumbria University.)

I am at a loss as to come up with definitions and examples of artistic research. Maybe it doesn't exist? (Or is Åsa Sonjasdotter's project, Potato Perspective, an artistic research project? Her project could only be undertaken by an artist. A journalist could have done the same investigative work, but could not have communicated it to an audience in the same way. She is conveying information about a larger topic, the history of the potato, about EU regulations and about the lifes of ordinary people. Or is this particular project turning into potato activism? (The project is not less valid if that is what we decide to label it. Its a beautiful project no matter what!))

All research and development projects need to have a research question and need to communicate the answer/s to the research questions to an audience.

Please help me thinking about these topics by leaving your comment! ^^

Museum of immigration opened in Paris...

"Fiskeboller i karri" places itself in the context of museums and exhibitions looking at immigration as positive influence in a society. Interkulturelt Museum in Oslo has just gotten a sister in Paris, Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration.

The opening has been low key, mirroring the problematic topic in french society. From 60° 24' N 5° 19' E we salute the project and all other projects aimed at making our world a friendlier one!

"Le Monde yesterday praised the museum and beseeched France to acknowledge the role of immigration in its history. "This museum bears witness that 'French identity' exists, but it has always been mixed," the paper said.

Hélène Lafont-Couturier, the museum's director, told the Guardian she hoped the museum would allow the nation to face "an important part of its history which it has preferred to hide from"." (posted at WorldHum.com by Eva Holland)

About the museum of immigration in NY Times.

Plan for week 46

Every week

Keep the blog updated


Work

• Visual develoment of Fiskeboller
  

• Working on the brief
  

Summing up Week 40
Last week was mostly dedicated to the Sensuous Knowledge conference.

Sensuous Knowledge 4.1

Comments from SK4:

I think that one of the differences between artistic practice and artistic research is that in artistic research must have something that is relevant to other people and that you have to communicate this.

From John Hyatt's talk:

If you ar going to design a car, study how they have designed cars previously, then go into your studio and forget all about it. All the knowledge will still be there and will come through no matter what. Everything you ever learnt is in there, you just have to open yourself to it.

Art and science were once the same line of inquiry.


First you have a question, you do the research; find out as much as you possibly can about the topic. You then spin it into the creative practice and hopefully something innovative comes out. This you again feed into the creative practice to test its viability and do more research and so on and so forth...

Scriptwriter needed!?

I feel very strongly that we need a scriptwriter. Where do we find the right person? Skrivekunst akademiet? Wibecke? TV-faget? Or could the content be developed through visual development and visual use of text? And then we could get a scriptwriter to make the actual texts... if it is necessary... hmmmmm.....

moodboards

I made some moodboards a couple of weeks ago. The first one i have become quite attached to. I like the layers, the patterns, the feeling of transparency and the play of the light through the material. Jo Anne will now build on these and continue the development of a visual language for Fiskeboller.

I am the boss!

We have had a meeting straightening out the lines of responsibility. We were all quite frustrated and by the time we met, all feeling that the project was not moving forward and not having the time to do anything about it. It was a long time since we had met due to Linda and Joannes workloads. After a short frustrated discussion we readily agreed that I need to be the project leader and must be aloud to make descissions. The two others will still be on board, but rather on concrete tasks, not as much in the daily running of the project. Which basically means that they decide what has to be done for the next meeting and I do it. They love it.

This is the reason...

This is the reason why "Fiskeboller" deals with an important subject; immediately after the first person with a background from somewhere further away than Scandinavia has been appointed Minister of equality, questions are asked about her loyalty to The Country. Her citizenship went through only two weeks before her appointment... and bright heads are questioning wether she wants to become Norwegian or to become minister...

She has lived and worked in Norway for 16 years.

When are you Norwegian enough?

Fred* located?

Had a good talk with Einar Wiig (the real dean of the design department :-)) yesterday. He will read through the exhibition evaluation and comment on structure etc. In addition he gave me a tip on contacting Runar Døving. From what I can see of his works he sounds... ideal! He will be called this week!

(*Fred is the codename Lykkejegerne put on the social anthropologist that we knew we had to get into the project. Could this be him?)

Plan for week 42

Every week

Keep the blog updated

Work

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process.
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft. (monday)
  

Meetings and seminars

• Stipendiatsamling - tuesday and wednesday
  
• Jack - friday
  

Summing up Week 41

• Had a good meeting with Petter, giving me good names to contact in different public institutions. He also had valuable input on the further develoment of Fiskeboller.
  

• The workshop with Kelly Davis was quite useful, in the sense that I realized I could not use the system he was teaching, but he still mapped out some tricks and tools that are useful in storytelling (storytelling not based on a character experiencing conflict that is...)

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process.
  
• Had a very good meeting with Linda, where we really got a huge step forward with the structure and the content. Dont know how I would have done it without her!
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft.
  
• First draft finished and given to Einar Wiik for a read through.

All cultures are dirty!

A-magasinet, the weekend magazine of one of the biggest newspapers in Norway, last Friday had a very good article about people from Somalia, apparently many have a hard time becoming integrated in Norwegian society. I will not discuss that topic as it is a bit too large a morsel to chew atm. It was the end of the article that made me think. It said "I remembered what a 19-year old I met outside the Somali mosque in Trondheimsveien had said. He was complaining in an aggressiv tone about how the media judges all Somali, before he said: -Kurds are rapists. But not Somali."

I think we have to be very clear in the exhibition about the fact that all cultures are mixes, are dirty so to speak (as opposed to the idea of national culture as something pure and uninfluenced), not only the Norwegian one. Otherwise we could get a situation where people could say; "Haha! You don't really have a culture, it is all a mix, nothing is Norwegian! It is not clean like our culture!"

All cultures are dirty, are mixes, are moving and growing. I like the description in "Blanke løgner, skitne sannheter" by Stian Bromark and Dag Herbjørnsrud. Loosely translated they write: "In the large perspective we are all immigrants. Nations and land areas are like circular tube lines: an eternal stream of people embarking and disembarking throughout history through thousands of years."

Plan for week 41

Every week

Keep the blog updated


Work

• Working on the exhibition script through a storytelling workshop with Kelly Davis.
  

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process. Send to Linda. (monday)
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft. (monday)
  

Meetings

• Department of Design - Petter - monday
  

Summing up Week 40

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process. Send to Linda.
• worked on it, will send it today
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft.
• will be finished Monday October 8th

"Review" Freedom of Speech exhibition

In Klassekampen yesterday Dagfinn Nordbø writes about the new freedom of speech exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. As it only opened last week I have not been able to see it yet, but will see it when I go to Oslo in two weeks. Nordbø is a text writer, mostly writing humorous texts for newspapers and radio. He has not set out to review the exhibition, but through his humorous comments he has made one of the better exibition reviews I have read in a Norwegian newspaper. ^^

Exhibition structure

I have sketched out a structure for the exhibition, and on a meditative walk on Sunday I managed to see a solution (at this stage anyway) for the last stage of the exhibition. I had mapped out that it would be an exhibition in three stages. The introduction talking about how culture never stands still, the main area using food culture to illustrate this point and the last part???? I hadn't come up with a solution, considering whether we should do scenarios for the future, not being comfortable about that; it can often become scary or cliched and not very constructive. I was also wondering how to bring the visitors themselves into the exhibition... So on the quiet walk I realised it would be perfect to have an installation in the end where the visitors can fill in their own connections to the world and have it printed out on a beautifully designed card. They could also become part of a map on the wall showing lines and connections.

This brings the element of visitor input (taken from Havlandet and the notes) and visibility in the exhibition, brings the large topic of culture to a personal level and gives us the possibilities of giving them something personal to take away from the exhibition.

In a talk with Jo-Anne yesterday she said that we have to make sure that we stress that there is allways a core that is you, your own personality, (not "You are what you eat" or "You are who you know" those sayings have allways bothered me...) and it is this core that has connections to the world.

Plan for week 40

Every week
Keep the blog updated

Work

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process. Send to Linda.
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft.
  

Summing up Week 38
Good meetings with Søren and an interesting seminar, both already described in earlier blogposts.

Supervision with Søren

Through gentle manipulation ;-) Søren made me decide to keep the evaluation on the process of Havlandet in the form of a bulletted list rather than in prose. The measuring and reporting fashion of the list makes it feel as if it is made by a machine analysing all the data available judging the different parts of the process against god-given questions.

The evaluation of the exhibition itself will be differeent from that with two parts; "what worked/what was good" and "what didn't work/wasn't good". With visuals ofc, and also with explanations (where relevant and possible).

What are we doing?

Wednesday there was a full day seminar about research and development at KhiB (Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen). I really enjoyed the discussions, even if they were not so much about research and development as such. The seminar is one of three this autumn and is obligatory for all teaching and researching personnel at KhiB.

We were placed in groups of ten and were presented with two projects, in our case very different ones. Professor Rita Marhaug was presenting a proposal for creating a platform for cooperation in development projects. And Professor Dave Vikøren presented his work with InsideNorway, a project where he works on increasing the reputation of Norwegian furniture design.

For me it was interesting to see that I felt more connected to Rita's project than to the industry of the furniture business. I realise that exhibitions (like all other spacial design projects) are "unika design", not mass produced (Yes it is obvious, but putting this into words put some things in place for me ^^).

I was pondering what the research part was in Dave's project and what differed it from a branding project in say visual or marketing communication.

In research by design it is the finished product that is the important result, in addition there must be reflections on the process, trials and errors. As the discussion progressed it became clear that Dave's project is twofold; he does design exhibitions for very different settings to display the furnitures. But the other, and I would perhaps say more important, part of the project is to actually design a system for promoting Norwegian furnitures, and give young designers a way into the market. The design of the system is in correspondence with the notion of the designer as an expert in problem solving. An exsample of this is the School of Design at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Their focus on design as a problemsolver has given them projects that is not typical for a design school. They have, among other things, re-organized the entire US Postal system and designed a new tax-system for Australia.

Plan for week 39

Every week
Keep the blog updated

Work

• Describe the exhibition idea
• Evaluation of Havlandet
  

Meetings

• Søren on thursday - discuss the evaluation and the new projectdescription

Seminar

• Research at KhiB - What are we doing?
  

Summing up Week 38

• Continue the description of the exhibition idea
• Transfered to week 39
  
• Detailed project plan for the autumn
• who do we need to contact?
• sponsors - how do we work with them? when to contact who? (fylkeskommune, kommune, business sponsors)
• Jo-Anne starts this process in Week 39

• Work on the projectdescription
• Getting there! We managed to crack the nut!

• Monday - Jack
• Good meeting with Jack, evaluating the design of Havlandet and discussiong the new project.
  
• Wednesday - Lykkejegerne
• As mentioned again and again; the meeting where we cracked ... it. ^_^
  

Cracking the nut!

I think we managed to crack the project last night!
The name of the project is Fiskeboller i karri
The aim is to make a traveling exhibition.
The goal is to make the visitors ask themselves "What is Norwegian?"
The takeaway message is that Culture doesn't stand still.


It has been a long discussion, and an emotional one for all of us and we were quite happy when it suddenly grew out of the pages and in our minds. Now we will have to test it with our key resources (collegues, friends, supervisors etc, both professionals and people who are potential visitors to this exhibition) and see if it holds water and endures scrutiny. Here is a video clip of our discussions at the slightly noisy kafé. We have decided to start meeting at Kunsthøgskolen, department of design, from now on.

Plan for week 38

Every week
Keep the blog updated

Work

• Continue the description of the exhibition idea
• Detailed project plan for the autumn
• who do we need to contact?
• sponsors - how do we work with them? when to contact who? (fylkeskommune, kommune, business sponsors)
  
• Work on the projectdescription
  

Meetings:

• Monday - Jack
• Wednesday - Lykkejegerne

Summing up week 37

• Continue writing the evaluation
• done
  
• Prepare for meeting with Jack next week; what do I want to discuss with him?
• project development, the evaluation of Havlandet, the exhibition theme
  
• Continue research for the exhibition; food history, installation inspiration.
  
• Visit two of Museum Vest's museums; Herdla and Kystmuseet i Øygarden.
• Only visited Kystmuseet, Herdla was closed
  
• Look at a weekly plan for the autumn. (Transfered from last week)
• and transfered again
  

Plan for week 37

Every week
Keep the blog updated

Work

• Continue writing the evaluation
• Prepare for meeting with Jack next week; what do I want to discuss with him?
• Continue research for the exhibition; food history, installation inspiration.
  
• Visit two of Museum Vest's museums; Herdla and Kystmuseet i Øygarden.
  
• Look at a weekly plan for the autumn. (Transfered from last week)
  

Summing up week 36:
Work

• Work on the process evaluation Havlandet (for meeting with Linda wednesday)
  
• Done
  
• Write out the new concept for the exhibition
• Started
  
• Look at a weekly plan for the autumn
• transfer to week 37
  

Meetings

• Department of Design, Petter Bergerud
• Good meeting with Petter, defining what the design department can do for me (maybe not so much what I can do for them...)
  
• Linda Kragseth (for work on the evaluation)
• Very good! So that is what evaluating means!
  

Evaluation

In order to truly learn from the process of developing Havlandet I have started to evaluate the process together with Linda Kragseth. Linda has a Bachelor of Marketing in Market communication and has been working for several years with developing the intranet for SkandiaBanken. She has a special interest in organisation development, and she seems to be asking all the right questions to bypass the obstacles of memory and personal grudges. It is very interesting to look at the process through these kind of glasses and be able to cooly draw conclusions for the benefit of future projects.

Mind you; we are not trying to make an complete evalution of the whole process, we are doing it from a slightly subjective angle; mine. As my project focus on defining my role, the role of the exhibition designer, we have decided to focus on that rather than trying to get a compelete and objective overview of the whole process. The evaluation will be finished in a few months time, I will then publish it on www.designingculture.no

Reviewing exhibitions

I received Museumsnytt (the Norwegian museum magazine) in the mail yesterday, and was happy to see Åse Enerstvedt doing a review of Kongospor at Museum of Cultural history in Oslo. I went there this summer and was not too impressed. But whats more was that I decided not to read here review before I had written my own (a quick one anyway), using my structure of Narrative, Method and Design.

After doing that and reading her review I saw that we agreed very much on the Narrative side (although; she writes it, I just nod enthusiastically at everything she writes!) but we disagree on the design side! She finds it elegant, I find it dark and unrelated to the subject. Very interesting! Maybe she would be interested in collaborating on exhibiton reviews with me?

Meeting with Department of Design

Monday, September 3.
Present: Petter Bergerud, Hanna Hilt

The aim of the meeting was to define how the department of design can contribute to the project. The following was concluded:

• Through the development of the new exhibition, both process and design
• Through critical reading of the reflection texts

Petter came with valuable insights and comments both regarding the exhibition theme, and on the research fellowship itself. He made the valuable comment that even in the endresult, the final work I produce (the reflections) there must be something more important, one single thing that is the final aim. This aim should inform all the work I am doing up to that point.

Fiskeboller med karri

Things have moved fast the last weeks. Lykkejegerne has really taken off and we have had enthusiastic discussions about concept and about organisation of the project. I have also been very aware of taking my supervisor's, and other people's, advice of making the project focused enough. It is so easy to get pulled away into the energy and excitement of the work, so many things that would be fun to do! But I started to feel the same rapid heartbeat as I felt when working on Havlandet (both good and bad; exciting to work with but also stressful to balance). So we narrowed it down to one exhibition idea; "How are you connected to the world?". The idea based on the model I sketched for mapping out different foods. This would be an installation were visitors could register their family's touches with the world outside of Norway (e.g. myself: Grandma Icelandic, uncle living in Argentina, the Hilt family shipwrecking outside Bergen on their way from Germany to America, great grandpa working as a doctor for the Indians in the wild west, father born in Brooklyn, etc.) . After registering they could enter the installation and see these connections visualized around them.

But, as the professional reader will see, it is still a huge project. In addition to the immediate technical problems, there are also questions like: What audiovisuals do we show from each country? How do we deal with politically charged areas?

So we narrowed it down even further, saying that what we want to talk about is how a culture that is alive (and we want our culture to be living) will allways be open and constantly changing. It is open to new impulses and molds new and old into something unique for that place and time. We want to show this by looking at traditional food in Norway.

Risengrynsgrøt, pepperkaker, raspeballer are some examples of food we regard as truly Norwegian. But how long have they been traditional? When did they become Norwegian? They all have ingredients like rice, sugar, potatoes, black pepper and cinnamon, foods that at some stage was imported by travelling humans. (And through this we also touch the debate of who is a Norwegian. What is a second generation immigrant? Third? Fourth? Nice comment by Jill Walker Rettberg here.)

Interestingly narrowing the project down thematically, opened it up for exploring exhibition ideas and design solutions. It seems by being focused thematically we have managed to get the project to focus more on the design of the exhibit.

Plan for week 36

Every week
Keep the blog updated


Work

• Work on the process evaluation Havlandet (for meeting with Linda wednesday)
• Write out the new consept for the exhibition
• Look at a weekly plan for the autumn

Meetings

• Department of Design, Petter Bergerud
• Linda Kragseth (for work on the evaluation)

Touring Bergen Kommune

Lykkejegerne went to a meeting with a business advisor at Bergen kommune this morning. We ended up being introduced to both the responsible for design, Evelyn Holm and to Ådne Meling who works with a new plan for "kulturnæring" (cultural business?) that Bergen kommune is initiating this fall. They were all very welcoming and eager to introduce us to the next relevant person!

The End Results

What will be presented to the examiners at the end of the fellowship project?


An exhibition (Lykkejegere) with a "high international level"


A reflective text - about the designers role
Explore 3-5 topics around this theme. Base them teoretically (its often smart to disagree with somebody!) and illustrate them practically (with my own results).

• Who has the editorial responsibility in the exhibition process?
• ...
• ...
• ...

Documentation of Havlandet

• Presentation of the exhibition
• (self)Evaluation of the process with experiences pointing forward to Lykkejegere.
• Evaluation of the exhibition itself.

Sketches

Some more sketches and exhibition ideas. One visualizing the origins of some traditional foods, like pepperkaker and risengrynsgrøt, that both are made with ingredients not grown in Norway. In a room the world map painted on all surfaces, several models of foodstuff hangs from the ceiling. Pull one down and a lights are lit in each part of the world that has provided the ingredients or development for that particular dish. Rope is connected to each of the lights so connections are at all times visible although they mix with the other food items on display and are not easy to tell apart, except when you pull and see the ropes move.


The other idea triggered by a picture in a magazine. Inspired by the old fashioned looking boxes where you can see a model landscape with several layers, like a stage set. What are they called again?

Containers

On the way down from the mountains I did some sketches on how containers can be modified to make simple to operate traveling exhibitions. Keywords; sliding, folding, pulling down, raising up, turning.

Lykkejegerne has had our first meeting and the atmosphere was electric! We laughed a lot, which I think promises good for the co-operation ^^. We have started a Basecamp-site which is already working. Atm we are co-writing a short project description for presentational purposes and developing the concept, pinpointing exactly what it is we want this project to be.

Lykkejegere

The NEW project is coming along nicely! Linda has said yes to being the project manager and Jo Anne will be the Graphic Designer. Together we will have equal responsibilities in developing the project. It is extremely exiting! The first time I have been able to come up with an idea and put together a team exactly the way I want it. First meeting with the triumvirate friday August 10.

Note to self

E-mail from Jack today:

Try to pull together a note to yourself to prevent burn out.

Before:

• Put together a project team that will pull together with you.
• Make sure the project is doable given the time frame and the resources available.

During:

• Always kill your darlings before they kill you!
• Never be too proud to accept help. At any time. Of any kind.

.

Revised project description

Writing the revised project description i seek refuge at Barista kaffebar. The slow murmuring in the background provides just the right amount of diversion to the deep consentration I need when writing. I notice that almost all the guests return their dishes to the counter, neatly tidying up the place. Is it because of the homey feel? Because of Anne's natural gifts at making you feel at home and welcome?

.

the work continues?

september looms on the horizon (is that a valid image?). here are the present work areas for the next year and a half:

• write - about myself as a designer, about design research, about how museums deal with designers... who has the editors power in the making of exhibitions?
• research design research - and make myself an overview of what actually exists out there.
• make? - do i make an exhibition on exhibitions? no i think not. too much work. but i do continue working with the mareco installation, and so my practice will continue.

.